Tag: Barack Obama

By comparison with her recent predecessors, she’s a strong speaker of the House. She has far more control than the previous Democratic speaker had, despite having to contend with a more conservative GOP and an ideologically diverse pack of Democrats.

“The Iranian people would welcome a hand extended to it if the hand is truly based on honesty,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday. The “hand” has so far come in the form of a New Year’s message from President Obama, a surprise direct diplomatic contact and a commitment from the U.S. to re-engage in multilateral talks.

It turns out that people can still be arrested and deported based on the same charges they’ve been acquitted of in court. The U.S. Constitution protects people from “double jeopardy,” being charged twice with the same offense. But in the murky world of immigrant detention, double jeopardy is perfectly legal.

The president on Tuesday made a surprise visit to Baghdad, where he expressed his gratitude to a raucous group of troops: “We have not forgotten what you have already done, we are grateful for what you will do, and as long as I am in the White House, you are going to get the support that you need and the thanks that you deserve from a grateful nation.”

President Obama appears to have fallen for the oldest false dichotomy in the Pentagon repertoire, and the easiest one to sell to the American public. It goes like this: The world is divided between the Evil Folks and the Good. The Good Folks, being what they are, are naturally pro-American, once they get to know us.

The bad rap that “faith-based initiatives” got during the last administration hasn’t kept the new management at the White House from treating its Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships seriously. It has fleshed out the lineup of advisers to a total of 25 with two new recruits.

Bob Dylan, seasoned troubadour and chronicler of a-changin’ times, recognizes a story-worthy character when he sees one, and he certainly sees one in Barack Obama, judging by his description of the president in an interview with the U.K.’s Times Online.

If the issue doesn’t trip Obama up on his visit to Turkey, he is going to have to walk into a far worse minefield on April 24 when he has to honor a campaign promise to call the 1915 massacre of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by Ottoman Turkey a “genocide.”

William K. Black made a name for himself busting bad bankers and the lawmakers who loved them during the savings and loan scandal. His book, “The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One,” says it all. Here he tells Bill Moyers that the treasury secretary is a failed regulator engaged in the cover-up of a massive fraud.

If we do not immediately halt our elite’s rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them.

Lawrence Summers is the man President Obama turns to for insight into the economy, so it’s more than a little disturbing that the very financial institutions the taxpayers are now rescuing—to the tune of nearly $3 trillion—paid Summers almost $8 million last year. Goldman Sachs & Co., a major beneficiary of the government’s largesse, paid him $135,000 for one speech.

Yes, this is the year Congress will finally give every American access to health insurance. For the first time since the passage of Medicare in the 1960s, the forces favoring action on health care reform are stronger than the forces of cynicism and obstruction.

The U.S. led a round of chest-thumping following North Korea’s alleged missile test Sunday, but President Obama also acknowledged that the United States is the only country to have used nuclear weapons against others and, as such, has a “moral responsibility” to lead the world toward a nuclear stockpile of zero.

President Obama’s NATO allies may have responded favorably to his call to ramp up the war effort in Afghanistan, but anti-war demonstrators near the French-German border made their opinions known with protests following the photo ops in Strasbourg, France, on Saturday.

Did President Barack Obama achieve anything at the G-20 summit besides showing up and pressing the flesh with other international political players? Tony Blankley isn’t so sure, but Robert Scheer and guest moderator Lawrence O’Donnell are ready with their rebuttals. And how about that ginormous budget plan?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has put March’s unemployment rate at 8.5 percent, the highest in a quarter-century. After 15 consecutive months of job loss, more than one in 12 people (who are looking for work) are unemployed.

Not even three months have passed since Obama’s historic inauguration, and already it tends to slip the nation’s collective mind that the first black president is, in fact, black. There may be hope for us after all.

Finally, after America has frittered away billions of taxpayer dollars arming Latin American death squads and incarcerating more of its own citizens on nonviolent drug charges than any other industrialized nation, the government is starting to re-evaluate federal narcotics policy.

Not a single House Republican voted for Barack Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget, but that didn’t stop the Democrats from passing it 233-196. The Senate is on its way to passing its own version, but the real clamor is over whether the final product will end up with reconciliation provisions that would filibuster-proof the president’s health care and energy proposals.

It’s now eminently clear that former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s media blitz to gain sympathy after he was ousted from office in January hasn’t helped his case, as he was charged with a whopping 16 felony counts on Thursday. However, Blagojevich wasn’t in Chicago to receive the bad news in person—he was vacationing near Disney World with his family.

The Thirty Years’ War occupies little space in the school texts of the English-speaking world, but its futility comes to mind when Richard Holbrooke speaks of the war he is supposed to manage, now the Af-Pak war.

Sadly, we have developed a system that rewards procedures over primary care. The incentives tip toward the kind of medicine that is performed with hands, tools and technology over the medicine that is practiced with eyes, ears and mind.

Afghanistan’s women are no longer in vogue. President Karzai has just signed a law that forces them to obey their husbands’ sexual demands and in general again consigns them to lives of brutal repression.

Following a private audience with the queen of England, President Obama joined a reception and dinner with other world leaders from the G-20 summit. What happens when you get Silvio Berlusconi, Hillary Clinton, Nicolas Sarkozy, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Prince Charles and J.K. Rowling in a room? More wine, please.

Voters in New York’s 20th District will have to keep waiting to find out who their representative in the U.S. House will be. After a special election, the Democrat led by just 65 votes, with thousands of absentee ballots still to count. The contest received national attention and was seen as a test of President Obama and his agenda, though the district skews Republican. Update: The lead shrinks.

This has gone from coincidence to self-parody to alarming. Another of Barack Obama’s nominees has had to apologize for not paying her full taxes. Kathleen Sebelius, the president’s pick to lead the Health and Human Services Department, has now paid off $7,918, a paltry debt compared with Tom Daschle’s $140,000.

A former police chief of Seattle—who directed the harsh action there against 1999’s WTO protesters—has changed his views on protests, as well as on drugs. The G-20 leaders meeting in London should heed his words.

In respect to tradition, one would expect Obama to deliver Notre Dame’s commencement address in May, but a crowd of Fighting Irish have decided to try to keep the new president away from the hallowed campus for fear that some of his thinking might rub off on them.

President Obama grabbed the proverbial steering wheel on Monday, shaking up the American auto industry by stating tougher conditions for receiving federal subsidies and forcing GM’s CEO to step down. But critics are wrong to suggest that this represents an unprecedented use of executive power.

The AFL-CIO spent $250 million in last year’s elections on behalf of Obama and other Democrats, yet a waffling president and a handful of senators have managed to kill the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, a cruel defeat for labor.

The president is telling Detroit to shape up or die while at the same time politely asking Wall Street, whose recklessness and greed caused this economic crisis, if it would be so kind as to accept another heaping helping of taxpayer funds.

Although they’re allotted $100,000 to redecorate, Barack and Michelle Obama will spend their own money updating the White House. The first family has turned to Michael S. Smith for the task. The designer has worked for Steven Spielberg, Rupert Murdoch and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, whose decorating habits have come to epitomize corporate greed.

On Sunday’s “Face the Nation,” President Obama did his best to convince CBS’ Bob Schieffer, and by extension the American people, that he knows what he’s doing in escalating U.S. military operations in Afghanistan—and that this won’t be his Vietnam.

If there is a trend in democratic nations now, it is toward younger politicians who express disenchantment with the status quo, more by questioning past approaches than by offering fully worked-out alternative systems.

The Obama administration auto task force has sent both GM and Chrysler back to the drawing board, turning down requests for additional loans until the companies come up with more realistic restructuring plans. The government will prop up GM for two months while the automaker tries again. Chrysler has 30 days.

GM CEO Rick Wagoner resigned Sunday, apparently at the request of the Obama administration as part of a larger bailout agreement. The ouster of the man who gave us the Hummer wasn’t entirely unexpected. He spent the last eight years driving the world’s biggest car company into a ditch. Now if only we could apply this logic to the banking bailout. Update

Congress’ work has often offered us transparency and has usually led to useful, progressive legislation. And now comes Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank’s choreographed extravaganza in the House of Representatives, supported by an echoing committee, with sound bites worthy of a night in the Borscht Belt.